“No matter how far they hit it, the ball always comes back.” – Shane Warne
Gideon Haigh on the action — and aura — that snared 708 Test wickets
Eight paces: that’s all it was. And only the last few counted. Shane Warne’s bowling action was seen more than 50,000 times in international cricket. Yet it never ceased to beguile and excite — that something so simple, so brief, and so artless could cause so much perplexity at the other end, and such anticipation among observers. Once the action coalesced, furthermore, it changed relatively little, even as Warne the bowler changed; rather, the emphasis was on keeping it in working order.
The pageant of Warne started not with the approach, as it does for most bowlers, but with the walk back. This commenced with an unconscious but unvarying rubbing of the right hand in the disturbed dirt of the popping crease – for grip, for feel, and for the reassurance, perhaps, of the ritual. Somehow, as in everything Warne did, it seemed to signify something larger: as dust and grit over time transmitted itself to Warne’s clothing, he appeared to acquire an earthiness, an affinity with the conditions. No player is so dependent on the turf on which the game is played as the spinner; it can make, break, enfang or defang him. So although Warne bowled better in a greater variety of ecosystems than almost any other comparable cricketer, his caress of the crease always felt like an act of obeisance, of propitiation of the cricket gods.
Then there was that easy, relaxed saunter to his bowling disc. It was the stroll of a man without a care in the world, whether he’d just beaten the outside edge or been hit for six — as Warne would say cheerfully: “No matter how far they hit it, the ball always comes back.” Once, at Trent Bridge, he observed England’s Robert Croft looking at a big screen admiring a six he had just hit. “Hey Crofty!” he called out. “Don’t worry, mate. You’ll be able to see the replay again in a couple of minutes.” He was right. On another occasion, at Basin Reserve, he delivered a long hop that was hit for four by New Zealand’s Andrew Jones, and winked at umpire Steve Dunne on his way back. “He thinks he can pick me,” Warne joked confidentially. After three orthodox leg breaks, Warne flashed the umpire another smile. “This is it,” he said. So it was: when a faster, flatter delivery hit Jones in front of middle a foot off the ground, Dunne upheld the plumbest of lbws.
For Warne, the walk back was a social occasion. If it wasn’t the umpire, it was the captain, a fielder or an opponent. Anything to add a little spice to the contest, a little theatre to the event, to enhance the sense of ease, command and imminent opportunity. All the while, Warne would also be unconsciously rolling the ball from his right hand into his left, savouring the physical sensations of imparting and experiencing spin, the muscle and metacarpal memory.
As Warne rounded his disc, his demeanour began to change. He did not switch on — Warne was always “on”. No, he switched the rest of the game off, brought all the activity on the field into himself. There was a pause. It was the best pause cricket has known: pregnant, predatory. It was this pause that Fanny Rush chose to capture for Warne’s portrait in the Long Room at Lord’s. Warne looks keenly out of the painting — down the wicket, as it were — straight back into the observer’s eyes. The gaze is rocksteady. The body is a study in relaxed readiness. The ball is hovering, preparatory to dropping back into his hand. You begin to wonder. What’s going on in there? What’s next? Most bowlers at the top of their run are thinking about what they might bowl. Warne’s pause was as much about letting you wonder what he might bowl. To quote one of his best bowling mots: “Part of the art of bowling spin is to make the batsman think something special is happening when it isn’t.”
More than any other game, cricket involves a kind of catechism — a proposition and a reply. There is the ball the bowler lets go; there is the ball the batsman receives. The same ball to two different batsmen can draw profoundly different responses and consequences; the same ball released from different hands at different stages of a game likewise. Warne let us see this maybe more clearly than any other bowler. There was a leg break, then there was a leg break from Shane Warne. To all obvious intents and measurements they might be identical — spin, arc, deviation. But one was simply a delivery, the other increasingly invested with what we might call Warnitude: a cognisance of the science, skill, lore and legend surrounding the bowler.
I am exaggerating here, because nobody has been capable of bowling a leg break like Warne. But what I wish to convey is that the delivery — and indeed the whole introductory choreography — were invested with an additional dimension by the identity of the bowler. What’s more, everyone knew it. Batsman after batsman came to the middle determined not to be drawn into the web of Warnitude. They would, they promised themselves, forget the reputation, scorn the aura, play the ball and not the man. Again and again they departed remonstrating with themselves that they would do this next time. It seemed unfair, absurd, nearly contrived. Critics carped that Warne got wickets “because he was Shane Warne”. Warne’s response to this would have been: “Thanks for the compliment.”
While what Warne was thinking during his little pause was secondary to the complexes forming in the batsman’s mind, there was, of course, always something. Mike Tyson once said that he visualised his punches coming out the other side of his opponent’s head; I used to feel that Warne did something similar as he stood at the end of his approach, looking at the batsman but also past and through them, as though they were already out. “He gives you the impression that he has already bowled the over to you in his head,” England’s Andrew Strauss said of facing him; it was an impression faithful to reality.
The most striking aspect of Warne’s approach was its homespun nature. Fast bowlers can often be distinguished by their run-ups; slow bowlers are not so obviously idiosyncratic. But Warne’s run-up was nothing of the kind: it was a walk-up, decisive but nonchalant, like somebody sliding up to whisper sedition in your ear. The ball commenced its journey mysteriously in Warne’s left hand before being imperceptibly slipped into the right, as though it were being slid around beneath one of three cups by a sidewalk hustler. The right hand then held the ball loosely, as loosely as it could be held without actually falling out.
The action itself was essentially unimprovable. For all the seeming doughiness of his physique, Warne was hugely strong in the shoulders and backside. With only a tiny jump, little higher than it would take to clear a skipping rope, he achieved colossal momentum through the crease, pushing off a back foot lying perfectly parallel with the back line, pivoting on a front foot to deliver the maximum rotation, swinging his right hip powerfully round. There was an audible grunt, and a hint of tongue in the corner of the mouth as the arm came over, but little other semblance of effort. It was almost as though the propulsion came from some external élan vital; in pictures of his action, Warne might be a bodysurfer surging through a wave. And while onlookers tended to resist the idea of Warne as an athlete because cricket involves intermittent and not linear exertion, he achieved at peak energy the paradoxical state that is characteristic of one: immense physicality, seeming weightlessness.“